Load characteristics of five all-electric residences using the heat pump for year-round air conditioning

THE residential heat pump offers a tremendous potential load to the electrical utility industry. A load which, with any reasonable degree of public acceptance, easily can equal and perhaps exceed several times the present-day total domestic electrical consumption. The total estimated residential electrical consumption in the United States was 29.7 billion kilowatt-hours for 1944 and 67 billion kilowatt-hours for 1950. The last known residential heating installation survey, made in 1940, gave the total useful heating fuel consumption as 2,382 × 1012 Btu which represents 697 billion kilowatt-hours when converted to equivalent electrical units and to approximately 155 billion kilowatt-hours if the heating was supplied by heat pumps having a coefficient of performance of 4.5.1 Using these figures, a 20-per-cent heat pump saturation of residential heating installations would bring about a consumption equal approximately to the total residential electrical consumption in the United States, providing it can be assumed that the increase in the heating installations and in the residential electrical consumption since 1940 were in about the same proportion. In any case, this load may be of such magnitude that its effect on the present and future electrical utility systems needs to be evaluated fully. All possible information must be obtained on the load factor, on the probable demand coincident with the system´s peak, on the diversity of a number of installations in any given area, and on the extent and duration of the peaks of the nondiversified demand in order to determine power cost as well as to provide suitable data for substation and feeder design and to permit proper sizing of distribution transformers.